The body as alterity: the case with gender dysphoria

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Stanghellini
Keyword(s):  
Gender Dysphoria ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Human Condition

This chapter argues that gender dysphoria—a person suffering from an incongruence between experienced gender and assigned gender—is another illustration of the vulnerable duplicity inherent in the human condition. I am not merely the matter of which I am made. Rather, I am that matter plus the form that I impose upon it. In trying to shape my matter, I experience myself as an autonomous person and, simultaneously, as a person whose autonomy is limited by the matter itself. Between sex and gender there is the same relationship as between matter and form. We can shape the matter we are ‘thrown into’ and give it the form we desire, obviously within the boundaries delimited by matter itself and by our capacity for autonomy. Being the person that I am is a task and a responsibility that consists in becoming who I am through what I am.

scholarly journals Sex and gender differences in nutrition research: considerations with the transgender and gender nonconforming population

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Whitney Linsenmeyer ◽  
Jennifer Waters
Keyword(s):  
Gender Equity ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Validity And Reliability ◽  
Nutrition Interventions ◽  
Step Method ◽  
Gender Nonconforming ◽  
Nutrition Research ◽  
Surveillance Programs ◽  
And Gender

AbstractA sex- and gender-informed approach to study design, analysis and reporting has particular relevance to the transgender and gender nonconforming population (TGNC) where sex and gender identity differ. Notable research gaps persist related to dietary intake, validity and reliability of nutrition assessment methods, and nutrition interventions with TGNC populations. This is due in part to the conflation of sex and gender into one binary category (male or female) in many nutrition surveillance programs worldwide. Adoption of the Sex and Gender Equity In Research (SAGER) guidelines and the two-step method of querying sex and gender has the potential to exponentially increase the body of research related to TGNC health.

Women's Bodies Between National Hospitality and Domestic Biopolitics

Paragraph ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROSALYN DIPROSE
Keyword(s):  
Government Regulation ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Body ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Political Ontology ◽  
Conservative Government ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
The Human Condition

This paper develops a political ontology of hospitality from the philosophies of Arendt, Derrida and Levinas, paying particular attention to the gendered, temporal, and corporeal dimensions of hospitality. Arendt's claim, that central to the human condition and democratic plurality is the welcome of ‘natality’ (innovation or the birth of the new), is used to argue that the more that this hospitality becomes conditional under conservative political forces, the more that the time that it takes is given by women without acknowledgement or support. Women's bodies are thus caught within the dual poles of conservative government: regulation of the unpredictable expressions of ‘natality’ in the ‘home’ and management of the uniformity and ‘security’ of the nation. The limitations in Arendt's political ontology of hospitality are addressed by adding consideration of the operation of biopolitics and of the body as bios.

scholarly journals Mutual conditioning of gender and love: Towards a non-gendered idea of humanity

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Slater
Keyword(s):  
Gender Diversity ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Philosophical Debate ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Gender Divisions ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Cultural Freedom ◽  
Cultural Constructions

It is a presumed opinion that gender and love mutually condition each other and that this presumption ought to be embraced by cultural norms, religion, human rights and the ethic of freedom. The notion of mutual conditioning presupposes a healthy and principled environment that facilitates the free dynamic interaction between gender and love. It is the purpose of this article to explore the outcomes of the gender revolution and the additional strands of complexities that it contributed to the human condition. Although feminism has created terminologies such as sex and gender, it is believed that these words have outlived their usefulness to make way for the present-day evolution towards a non-gendered idea of humanity. Gender diversity seeks mutuality, and true love accommodates multiplicity; hence, the interacting and intra-acting of gender and love inevitably come face-to-face with cultural, legal, social, religious and moral milieus that hamper or even contradict the concept of mutual conditioning. This article seeks to trace the evolution of gender within diverse cultural constructions created by new liberal living conditions, but which have not yet infiltrated the diverse cultural domains where gender remains an entity without cultural freedom and therefore undermines the process of mutual conditioning of gender and love. The idea of gender as transcending bodily sex forms part of an old theological and philosophical debate; it, however, resurfaces here while revisiting Aristotle’s idea of a non-gendered society or humanity. A degendered society implies a society that is free from dependence on gender, whereas a non-gendered humanity transcends gender divisions and associations, with its aspirations linked to the transcendence or consciousness of human nature. Love, in this sense, transcends all human dissections, and this article ascertains its capacity to mutually condition the diversity of gender and love.

scholarly journals Gender, gestation and ectogenesis: self-determination for pregnant people ahead of artificial wombs

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (11) ◽  
pp. 787-788
Author(s):  
Claire Horn
Keyword(s):  
Gender Equality ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
The Body ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Biological Approach ◽  
Political Perspective ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
And Gender

AbstractIn this short response, I agree with Cavaliere’s recent invitation to consider ectogenesis, the process of gestation occurring outside the body, as a political perspective and provocation to building a world in which reproductive and care labour are more justly distributed. But I argue that much of the literature Cavaliere addresses in which scholars argue that artificial wombs may produce greater gender equality has the limitation of taking a fixed, binary and biological approach to sex and gender. I argue that in taking steps toward the possibility of more just practices of caregiving and family making, we must look first not to artificial womb technologies but to addressing the ways that contemporary legal and social practices that enforce essentialising, binary ways of thinking about reproductive bodies inhibit this goal.

Sex differentiation and body fat: Local biologies and gender transgressions

2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 379-391
Author(s):  
Petra Jonvallen
Keyword(s):  
Medical Research ◽  
Body Fat ◽  
Sex Differentiation ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The One ◽  
Local Biologies ◽  
Monitoring Devices

This article examines how sex differentiation is invoked from body fat with a focus on how various monitoring devices participate in the construction of bodies. By using the concept of ‘local biologies’, denoting the linkage of the body to place with its local physical and social conditions, it argues against the ‘one-size-fits-all’ paradigm of modern medicine and critiques the mechanistic search for regularity in medical research. By looking at medical literature on obesity and how contemporary obesity researchers and clinicians link body fat to sex, local biologies of bodies in a Swedish obesity clinic are contrasted to the universal biologies represented in medical research. The article also provides empirical examples of how fat has the potential to undermine traditional sex and gender binaries.

Expertise and Non-binary Bodies: Sex, Gender and the Case of Dutee Chand

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeleine Pape
Keyword(s):  
Women Athletes ◽  
Athletic Performance ◽  
Female Athlete ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Biological Difference ◽  
And Gender

How do institutions respond to expert contests over epistemologies of sex and gender? In this article, I consider how epistemological ascendancy in debates over the regulation of women athletes with high testosterone is established within a legal setting. Approaching regulation as an institutional act that defines forms of embodied difference, the legitimacy of which may be called into question, I show how sexed bodies are enacted through and as part of determinations of expertise. I focus on proceedings from 2015 when the Court of Arbitration for Sport was asked to decide whether an Indian sprinter, Dutee Chand, could compete as a female athlete. Despite acknowledging that sexed bodies are unruly, the court ultimately endorsed the use of testosterone as seemingly essential to women’s athletic performance, thereby reasserting a two-category model of biological difference. The legitimacy of these regulatory efforts was established through the concurrent narrowing of expertise and the body, a process that is also revealed to be gendered.

scholarly journals Men of Parts: Masculine Embodiment and the Male Leg in Eighteenth-Century England

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 797-821 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
The Body ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
The Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

AbstractThis essay explores changes in eighteenth-century male clothing in the context of the history of sexual difference, gender roles, and masculinity. The essay contributes to a history of dress by reconstructing a range of meanings and social practices through which men's clothing was understood by its consumers. Furthermore, critically engaging with work on the “great male renunciation,” the essay argues that the public authority that accrued to men through their clothing was based not on a new image of a rational disembodied man but instead on an emphasis on the male anatomy and masculinity as intrinsically embodied. Drawing on findings from the material objects of eighteenth-century clothing, visual representations, and evidence from the archival records of male consumers, the essay adopts an interdisciplinary approach that allows historians to study sex and gender as embodied, rather than simply performed. In so doing, the essay not only treats “embodiment” as an historical category but also responds to recent shifts in the historical discipline and the wider academy towards a more corporealist approach to the body.

Embodied and Existential Wisdom in Architecture

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juhani Pallasmaa
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
The Body ◽  
Full Understanding ◽  
Sexual Appeal ◽  
Pedagogic Practices ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Human Embodiment ◽  
The Human Condition

In our culture, intelligence, emotions and embodied intuitions continue to be seen as separate categories. The body is regarded as a medium of identity as well as social and sexual appeal, but neglected as the ground of embodied existence and silent knowledge, or the full understanding of the human condition. Prevailing educational and pedagogic practices also still separate the mental and intellectual capacities from emotions and the senses, and the multifarious dimensions of human embodiment.

scholarly journals Why Individuals Respond To COVID-19 Differently: A Battle of Sexes?

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (10) ◽  
pp. 459-466
Author(s):  
Olagunju Abdulrahmon A. ◽  
Amanah Lewis-Wade
Keyword(s):  
Gene Networks ◽  
Research Area ◽  
The Body ◽  
Future Perspective ◽  
Cytokine Storm ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Clinical Indicators ◽  
Severe Infections ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Impact

Several factors including genetic variations, cytokine storm (CS), macrophage activated syndrome (MAS), and lymphopenia have been recently discovered to influence the severity of COVID-19. Many studies have exclusively studied the pathogenesis of this disease, which includes the entry of the virus into the body, multiplication and spread, the progression of tissue damage, and the production of an immune response. However, questions like what makes some people more vulnerable than others to SARS-CoV-2 - the causative agent of the coronavirus disease; the role of gene networks in determining or influencing the efficiency of infection or the severity of COVID-19 symptoms are still in the valley of obscurity. What makes some SARS-CoV-2 infected individuals extremely sensitive to the development of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) while others are asymptomatic remains to be understood. Herein, we review the impact of a genetic variant in susceptibility and severity among sex and gender disparities, the significance of this variation in cases of severity and immune responses. Furthermore, we address major characteristics in severe  COVID-19 cases, such as biochemical and homeostatic effects. For example, lymphocyte count and concentrations of inflammatory mediators within patients. Also, this paper identifies key clinical indicators of severe infections in the presence of cytokine storm and lymphopenia. Moreover, it takes into account predisposing factors that induce the severity of symptoms and underline the differences between mild and severe infections. Lastly, we explained the benefits of using bioinformatics to accelerate the progress made in COVID-19 research and future perspective in this research area.

Gender Dysphoria, Eating Disorders and Body Image: An Overview

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 518-524 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Milano ◽  
Paola Ambrosio ◽  
Francesa Carizzone ◽  
Valeria De Biasio ◽  
Giuseppina Foggia ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Eating Disorders ◽  
Gender Identity ◽  
Gender Dysphoria ◽  
Eating Behaviors ◽  
The Body ◽  
Prevention Measures ◽  
Transgender People ◽  
Effective Prevention ◽  
Biological Sex ◽  
And Gender

Background:: Gender dysphoria is a clinical condition in which a state of inner suffering, stress and anxiety is detected when biological sex and a person's gender identity do not coincide. People who identify themselves as transgender people are more vulnerable and may have higher rates of dissatisfaction with their bodies which are often associated with a disorderly diet in an attempt to change the bodily characteristics of the genus of birth and, conversely, to accentuate the characteristics of the desired sexual identity. Aim:: The purpose of this work is to examine the association between dissatisfaction with one's own body and eating and weight disorders in people with gender dysphoria. Results:: Gender dysphoria and eating disorders are characterized by a serious discomfort to the body and the body suffers in both conditions. The results of our study suggest that rates of pathological eating behaviors and symptoms related to a disordered diet are high in patients with gender dysphoria and that standard screening for these symptoms must be considered in both populations at the time of evaluation and during the course of the treatment. Conclusions:: In light of this evidence, clinicians should always investigate issues related to sexuality and gender identity in patients with eating disorders, to develop more effective prevention measures and better strategies for therapeutic intervention..

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